Rickey Henderson passed away on Saturday. He was just four days shy of his 66th birthday, which would have been this Wednesday, Christmas Day.

According to Baseball Reference there have been 79 major league baseball players born on Christmas, and only three of them are in the Hall of Fame. Pud Galvin pitched in 15 seasons beginning in 1875 and ending in 1892 and won 365 games. Nellie Fox was a slick-fielding second baseman for 19 seasons and won the American League Most Valuable Player Award in 1959.

While Galvin and Fox each had impressive careers, clearly Rickey Henderson was the best player ever born on Christmas Day.

Rickey Nelson Henley Henderson bounced into this world on Christmas Day 1958. He bounced through the big leagues for 25 seasons from 1979 through 2003. He started out with the Oakland Athletics, played all over the place, and returned to the Athletics three separate times.

Rickey left Oakland for the New York Yankees in 1985 but returned to the Athletics midway through the 1989 season. He stayed with Oakland until the second half of the 1993 season before going to the Toronto Blue Jays; he went back to Oakland the next season. After two seasons in Oakland, he was with the San Diego Padres for a season and a half and finished the 1997 season with the Anaheim Angels. He was back in Oakland in 1998. He was with the New York Mets in 1999 and part of 2000, but he finished that season with the Seattle Mariners. He went back to the Padres in 2001, on to the Boston Red Sox in 2002, and finished up with the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2003. At each stop along the way Rickey played the game with a child-like enthusiasm. You could tell he loved the game.

Rickey is famous for holding the record for the most stolen bases in major league history (1,406), but he was much more than a base stealer; he also was the greatest leadoff hitter in the history of the game.

Scoring runs is the principal element in the game of baseball, and Rickey scored more runs (2,295) than any other player in major league history. For a bit of perspective, Pete Rose played in 481 more games and got 1,201 more hits than Rickey, yet Rickey somehow managed to score 130 more runs than Rose did.

Rickey also holds the major league record for leadoff home runs with 81. He was the AL Most Valuable Player in 1990 and played on two World Series Championship teams (1989 and 1993).

Rickey was a sabermetrician’s dream. He walked 2,295 times leading to a career on-base percentage of .401.

I had the pleasure of meeting Rickey in 2015 during one of his stops in Nashville when he was serving as a roving minor league instructor for the Athletics. During our brief conversation I mentioned to Rickey that he was the only non-pitcher in the Hall of Fame who batted right-handed and threw left. He knew it was rare, but didn’t realize he was the only such player in the Hall. “I wonder why that is?” he said. He left me with the impression that he was going to check into it.

Stories abound about Rickey speaking of himself in the third person, and apparently, he rivaled Yogi Berra in the use of malapropisms. But I found him to be intelligent, articulate, and witty, and he never once referred to himself as Rickey.

It saddened me to learn that Rickey Henderson passed away. Baseball could use a few more guys like him.